Offbeat Eats

In early December I flew out to the Phoenix area as part of a trip to go backpacking in the Grand Canyon, but had a few days before and after the trip to visit with friends and family in the Phoenix area. Like many of my Arizona trips, I met up with my friend Allyson for lunch, and this time we decided to go to Old Town Scottsdale. Old Town Scottsdale is mostly “fake Old West” and “fake Native American Trading Post” shops on the tackier-end of the scale, but there are a few gems hiding amongst the various “Trading Posts”. One of the them is The Frybread Lounge, an Indigenous-owned restaurant serving up Indigenous staples, primarily focusing on frybread.

As mentioned in the previous review, a trip to Arizona often involves meeting up with friends. For our second lunch outing with friends, we went to an old favorite, Culinary Dropout, that I hadn’t visited in a few year. Culinary Dropout is an Arizona-based chain, with the original location opening back in 2010 on Scottsdale’s “Waterfront” to good reviews, and now it has grown to over a dozen locations. We went to the relatively new Scottsdale Quarter location, which is one of the newer “outdoor malls” in North Scottsdale.

On my second night in Arizona, I met up with my old friend Allyson. She wanted to try out a place in Scottsdale recommended by her friends, FnB. Opening back in 2009, FnB has gotten quite a bit of press in recent years, up to and including the head chef Charleen Badman winning the 2019 James Beard award for Best Chef of the Southwest. FnB is primarily known for doing farm-to-table cuisine with local ingredients (including the wine list; FnB has quite the list of Arizona winemakers in their cellar), serving up gastropub food in a modest restaurant space located off of Craftsman Court in Old Town Scottsdale.

(Closed) Wandering about Scottsdale, we noticed a little shop on Stetson Drive called “Lee’s Cream Liqueurs” which featured a variety of ice cream flavors, many of which were made with real liqueurs. While all sorts of little ice cream stores seem to be popping up everywhere, and some of them (like Humphrey Slocombe in San Francisco, whose cornflake and bourbon ice cream I reviewed last May) have the occasional liqueur-infused flavor on the menu, most places don’t feature it outright. There’s actually a good reason for that, in that the much lower melting point of alcohol makes it hard to make a good ice cream without sacrificing a little bit of firmness. That said, Lee of Lee’s Cream Liqueur seems to have figured it out, since about half of her flavors are either outright liqueur-flavored, or have liqueur-flavored swirls in them. But Lee’s Cream Liqueur looked to be relatively popular, and the ice cream looked enticing, so we decided to give it a try…